A Brief History of Barefoot Running

Minimalist shoes and barefoot running has been a strategy of champions for decades

Rome, Sept. 10, 1960: Starting line of the Olympic Marathon – The three New Zealanders, Jeff Julian, Barry Magee and Ray Puckett, nervously await the starting gun. Standing next to them they notice an unknown African runner with a skeletal figure and no shoes. "Oh, well, that's one we can beat, anyway," Puckett says.

The African was Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia. His bare feet skimmed over the hot streets of Rome that night to give him the Olympic gold medal in a world-record 2:15:16.2. Magee was third. "It was amazing that Bikila was standing right next to us on the line," Magee told me late last year. Puckett's ill-fated remark has become urban legend. David Maraniss's book Rome 1960 wrongly attributes it to a member of the American team.

Bikila's gold medal in Rome is the most famous barefoot victory in modern running history, but far from the only one. Bare feet were not invented in 2009, and have been the footwear of choice for many top and other runners long before the current fashion.

Same for minimalist shoes. The idea that less weight on your feet helps you go faster is not rocket science, nor a deep secret preserved for centuries by lost tribes. Shoe companies' 2011 "minimalist" models follow a long line. In 1951 Shigeki Tanaka (Japan) won the Boston Marathon in tiny canvas sock-shoes with a separated big toe. In 1953, Roger Bannister's search for perfection and the 4-minute mile led him to a Wimbledon shoemaker called Sandy Law, who custom-made track spikes with uppers of soft, super-light kangaroo skin. I can vouch for it. In 1957, as a young Bannister fan at school in Wimbledon, I had Law make a pair for me. Problem: the long spikes and frail heel were a mistake for cross country.

In the 1960s, top British road runners wore imported Japanese Tiger Cubs, a featherweight improvement on our usual clunky tennis shoes. In 1967 a rival English shoe was marketed with the slogan "Run Barefoot on the Road." Some of us found a line of mass-produced and very light black sneakers that we mysteriously dubbed AA60s, since that was stamped on the rubber soles. I ran sub-50 minutes for 10 miles in those. Problem: blisters if the road was hot.

In 1973, in Auckland, New Zealand, the Laser Shoe Company, established by Arthur Lydiard's brother, Wally, developed the distinctive Toe-Peepers, with a cut-open front that cooled the foot and eliminated chafed toes–"a world first," says Magee. One problem: stones could sneak in. In 1985, Nike introduced the Sock Racer–bright yellow, no laces, no tongue, very light, felt great. Problem: it was so hard to get the darn things on that you were exhausted before a race.

Runners who think about their craft have always been willing to go minimal, as well as learn from people who live close to nature. So we have long been familiar with the Tarahumara Indians. Far from being a hidden unknown tribe, their prowess and their limitations as runners are well-known in the running world. Several of them have been trained and selected to represent Mexico, and their running rituals have been reliably recorded in at least one British mass-circulation newspaper, and American books such as Peter Nabokov's deeply informative Indian Running (1981), required reading for anyone claiming to understand Native American running culture.

Britain's Tim Johnston got to know a group of Tarahumara when he was living in Mexico in 1967 to prepare for the 1968 Olympic marathon. A Cambridge graduate and international lawyer, Johnston had placed second in bare feet in the 1967 International Cross-Country Championship.

"They were with the Mexican pre-Olympic squad, happy to have nothing to do but run all day, but they were very slow, just shuffling along in traditional huaraches. Kempka, their Polish coach, wanted to find some young enough to train into competitive marathoners. Farther south than Chihuahua, in the Chiapas, in the early morning you could encounter whole family groups of Mayan Indians, kids to grans, trotting heavily laden along the mountain trails on their way to market," Johnston recalled in 2010.

Runner-coach-scientist-author Bruce Tulloh, who won the European 5,000m championship barefoot on cinders in 1962, visited and studied the Tarahumara in 1971, and wrote fully about them in the magazine of Britain's Observer Sunday newspaper.

"Those I saw all ran in their huaraches. Their stamina was impressive. I was still in 14:00 shape for 5,000m, and one of their stars, Ramon, in his mid-40s, ran with me for 90 minutes and never took his hat off. I also ran with a younger runner, Madril, whose pulse after a brisk 50 minutes was 10 beats lower than mine (but of course I was not altitude-adjusted)," Tulloh told me.

Tulloh had been part of scientific research into barefoot running in 1961, conducted by Dr. Griffith Pugh, famous as the medical leader of the mountaineering team that conquered Everest in 1953. Later Pugh did seminal research into altitude training.

"Dr. Pugh had me run repetition miles, to compare the effect of bare feet, shoes, and shoes with added weight. He collected breath samples.

It showed a straight-line relationship between weight of shoes and oxygen cost. At sub-5:00 mile pace, the gain in efficiency with bare feet is 1 percent, which means a 100m advantage in a 10,000m. In actual racing, I found another advantage is that you can accelerate more quickly," Tulloh said.